Project Discovery lost progress

Communications Center General Discussion
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We now have the third phase of project Discovery related to the Covid-19.

I am one of those people who had done alot of the previous discovery (phase 2) and had reached level 491 before my progress was wiped without any notice that it will happen or when it will happen.

Obviously, considering how long it takes to get there (dozens of hours), I am frustrated, especially because I can’t find any reason why this should happen like it did. A simple: “We are planning a release in that week and the current progress will be wiped” would be enough for me to either finish the levels or not do Discovery for the past month when I tried to get the level 500 reward.

Here https://www.eveonline.com/article/q9wr04/plex-for-good-eve-and-ccp-updates CCP stated that a new discovery is in the works and we will get more details as they are ironed out. We didn’t get any details, also nobody told that phase 2 progress will be wiped and when it will happen. Why did it had to happen like that?

On my ticket asking why there was no communication and is there any action planned like allowing us to finish remaining levels or something, I was simply informed that Player Experience Team does not have information to give me and they also can’t do anything. The only thing to do is: “bring this issue to the awareness of the Community Management or the CSM”. On the question of how to bring awareness of Community Management I got the reply that I should post my thought on forums. So here I am with a forum post, so maybe someone from the CM can become aware.

Well, Community Management, if you see this, I would be really glad to get answer to 3 questions:

  1. can you give sensible explanation as to why idea of giving us details in the end turned out to be a full launch without any heads-up about it happening and any info, that all the progress for phase 2 of project discovery would be lost?
  2. whether there is any action planned concerning the players lost progress by allowing for us to finish the remaining levels or something or we are supposed to just take it what it is?
  3. as we are supposed to jump in on the next Discovery phase now, is the deletion of progress for this phase also planned without any notice of the fact that it will happen and estimation of when?

Regards
Tomats

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Also…get those gosh darned waffle dots in the corners of the new PD UI out of the way…

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Removed an off topic post. Second warning.

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I am not a community manager, but I can answer these questions.

Because Covid is happening now, and its better to get this up and running as soon as possible to save as many lives as possible.

Its all about saving lives.

Youre not… against… saving lives, are you?

No. We gave you ample time and opportunity to finish Project Discovery. The fact that you did not, even though it went on for longer than the previous project discovery, can only be blamed on your poor time maangement and lack of willpower, and not us pulling the plug so early but not really early because we gave you so much time.

Wasnt there a guy who got to like level 2500?

Its safe to say you will have a year to finish, as that is the expected timeframe of when a vaccine will come out.

Also, let me add, there was plenty of time given, and yes, this is how the last project discovery ended too. All previous progress from the last project discovery was wiped too.

The thing about this is, this project discovery thingy went on for a very, very, very, very long time. Like several years long. If youre just starting this game and you couldnt get to it, well, then thats too bad for you. But you were level 495 so that didnt seem like it was the case. You had a lot of time to finish it, you did not, and now its gone. Procrastination pays off later, but sometimes you miss out, and thats the risk you take with procrastination.

Regards.

Solonius.

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I enjoyed working with the old version of project discovery, and I’d made a fair amount of progress. I loved the fact that it related to the theme of the game (insofar as it was about the exploration of space). Lke the OP however, this progress has now all been wiped out.

With looking for planetoids I was consistently achieving around 80-90% accuracy. When I tried to do the required tasks in the new version I’ve struggled to get past 30% (maybe I find the data with planetoids easier or something) which has been frustrating and a bit disheartening.

The long and the short of this is that although I’ve now checked out the new version, and whilst I get that the aim is admirable in the wake of the global pandemic, I doubt I’m going to do much with it.

I would have liked to have had the option of carrying on with planetoid searches but I guess that having two types of data as an option for players, for some technical reason, wasn’t viable.

Pity.

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I don’t agree with the 5 submissions per minute restriction though.

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While your points are true, nothing of what you stated hindered CCP to communicate. They could have said in announcement that they plan next month/coming weeks launch and inform those, who don’t know, that the current progress would be wiped. Wouldn’t it be a respectfull way to do it?

It’s absolutely normal that you don’t have all the information and you can say that. It’s absolutely normal that you wont be able to give a precise date and you can say that as well.
But I am frustrated and not happy when they say they will give details and don’t give any. Well if you are not going to communicate then don’t state you will. I kinda rushed discovery after the announcement there will be new one, cause I didn’t know what would happen with the current one, and lacked like 2 days to finish it.

Not everybody plays the game since 2003 and knows all history of eve and how it’s development and new feature launches happen. I started to play when second phase was going already, so I have no idea, how the first ended.

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Preach!

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They told people a month ago that the citadel update was coming. There are still people here today who claim they were blindsided and are angry about the change because they lost stuff from their citadel.

They did give you the information. Nowhere did they promise that the new iteration of Project discovery will begin after the information was released.

Sure. And if you start playing EVE online on February, you probably didnt get any of the Christmas bonuses from the 2019 winter events. You can always create a scenario, or be in a scenario where you just missed, or completely missed an event because of when you started or because of personal problems.

But whatever the reason, it isnt the game companys responsibility to compensate you or to tell you when an event is ending, anymore than its CCPs job to tell you that they are nerfing Vindicators next week.

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All of the rebuttal replies to OP are entirely missing the point. How difficult would it have been to give everyone at least a couple of weeks notice that the PD theme was going to change, or even a week? None whatsoever. They didn’t and people are rightfully upset that they weren’t given the chance to make a decision about whether they were going to grind the last few levels they needed to reach a goal.
I was only a couple of levels away from getting the Enforcer skin and, yes, I am annoyed that I did not get any warning, so that I could have put in a little bit of extra effort and got that reward.
All anyone is asking for is some communication. There was none given regarding the actual swap-over date and that is just very poor from CCP.

Edited to add: Similar to a poster above, I raised a ticket to voice my displeasure with how this was handled and was also told to raise the subject with the CSM and also to make a comment in the forum, so here I am.

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We are talking from 2 different perspectives:

  • you are talking about CCP not being responsible for changes towards their clients. Yes, legally they are not. According to EULA, they can reset everyone’s skills, wallets and hangars tomorrow. The day after their business would end. Executives might be liable to owners depending on what Icelandic law stipulates. But they would not be responsible to us. Doesn’t mean they should act like that;
  • I am talking about how with miniscule effort in communication they could considerably reduce player (old and new) retention and how strange it is, that they don’t do that. And I showed just one example where a client feels like his time investment towards something is just dismissed.

Eve is a sandbox and a game that is out for 17 years. There are many different players in eve, depending on their preferences, time played, amount of assets, casualty/hardcorness.
Part of eve’s magic is that you can define long term goals and work to achieve them. Some of those require years to get to with normal in-game means. The goals are all varieties - fly a specific ship, get x kills in a ship/class/space, build a specific ship/structure/item, try a certain activity (with 100 bil investment, 2 years training time and such).

The nature of eve of course requires changes which will interact with those goals, which sometimes are close to finishing a 5 years work. That is just how it is and that is not bad per se. What matters is, what does a dev as a professional do in these cases. Dissing your clients wont get you clients or make them continue to use your service. They wont define new goals to take the old rabbit hole, they will just leave. Or you can talk to them, give information you have, allow them to prepare and generally take into account the impact of changes. That would considerably reduce dissatisfaction with the events that come. The last one being an easy way how to build a healthy ecosystem between the devs and their clients.

To me, it seems that for some strange reason CCP thinks that every player has all the skillpoints, can fly anything and adapt to any change within days. Well, when I trained to fly my first doctrines, nerfing of single ship basically meant that a month was wasted and I couldn’t join fleets till I trained for another doctrine. And there are many people like that. After 2,5 years of playing I am finally in a position where I can fly enough stuff to adapt and I have options, but hey, 2,5 years is quite a time, not?

Anyways, would love eve to be great, but alot of incompetent decisions from CCP makes me worried. That is why I talk - maybe Iceland is a strange place and it is easy to not see the obvious there. They talk about reducing retention, but much of what they do just fuels it.

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Totally agree. Keep up the good work!

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You literally had years to finish it. Years.

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Well, no.

The fact that they didnt tell you a hard date on when they were ending the years-long, literally years and years long PD, but told you that they were replacing it, is not dissing their clients, because there will always be clients who think they were dissed, who think they were ill-informed, even if they were informed a month in advance.

It is a fact that in the past, even with the information readily available and sent to people, they still missed deadlines and blamed CCP. The previous login events, where I spent considerable time responding to, is a great evidence of this.

The people who missed the deadline will always complain, irrespective of whether they were given advanced notice or not.

The fact is, they gave information, they told you a new PD was coming, the old one had been running for several years, and it ended.

Do you honestly think that games like League of Legends or Dota 2 gives players ample time to switch their main characters by telling them weeks in advance that they will be nerfing a character, or buffing another character?

That is less time than the 3 years that this PD has been going on for.

Not a lot of people are upset about this, infact most of us had already stopped doing PD because we didnt find it worth our time or had already gotten the rewards we wanted.

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Still doesn’t mean that CCP is free from some pointed criticism of their communication skills. Both PD and Forgotten Fortresses suffered from the same failure to adequately communicate clearly, effectively, and early enough to prevent much of the angst going on. Dev blogs were merely ok, but in the case of PD never delivered on a promissed update before implementation. E mail notification appears to have been spotty in parts for some people. The launcher failed to either adequately warn or to link to an explanation of future changes, usually just on the usual skin or injector sale. Need to increase the presence of major game mechanic change notifications in the log in screen weeks BEFORE they happen.

Overall, it was a series of failures by the community relations/Devs to use the ability that CCP already has to better inform their current customers. For some paying Omega players, it feels like it was less than stellar service for a paid product. Well, I hope that CCP learns and does a better job in the future.
Isn’t this a job for CCP Aurora?

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